Magrit Read online

  “My very poor girl,” he said. “I tried to protect you. I really did. But even with all my help and all my advice and all the clever, clever things you learned along the way …” He turned her so they stared at the grave beneath them, and the girl’s body it covered. “When you were four years old, you fell into this cemetery and nobody even noticed, or thought to look for you here when they realised you were gone. You were all alone, with nobody to help you or teach you or kiss you when you were hurt or scared or simply needed to feel arms around you. So you wandered the grounds and learned to survive by touching and tasting and getting pricked and bitten and feeling cold or hot or wet as the seasons demanded. And you found rags to sleep in and shrouds to wear and bones and cans and sticks to build into a friend.” Inside her mind, she felt him smile. “And more than a friend: a protector and teacher and parent, when you needed it, and friend when you didn’t, yes. And so you learned that weeds tasted horrible and gravel hurt to sleep on and plastic bags tore open and broken books had pictures and all the lessons you needed to survive and grow up and soon you were nine years old, and the world was just a memory.” He sighed, like the breath of a dying man, full of loss and regret and the wish that everything had been different.

  “When you were almost ten years old, you cut your finger on a rusty tin can, like you had done a hundred times before. And you washed it in the water like you always did and wrapped it in a scrap of rag like you always did and kept it away from dirt and dust like you had learned to do. Only this time, it didn’t heal. It grew infected and festered and painful. And slowly, my poor, poor girl, you fell sick and weakened. And one day, quite long ago, you died.”

  “No.”

  “You died. You did. I’m so very, very sorry, but there it is. You wandered out to the grass behind the chapel and you lay down and you fell asleep and you never woke up. You died, and your body became a skeleton, and you, you who are a beautiful girl, my beautiful girl, you rose up from your dead body, and you have been here with me ever since, nearly ten years old, for fifty and sixty and seventy years and more. Always nearly ten.”

  “I …” Magrit wanted to argue. But somewhere, at the bottom of her heart, she knew he was right and that she had always, somehow, known. “If that’s my … if that’s me …” She reached out and stroked the wooden cross – so real, so hard underneath her fingers – anything rather than think about the bent assembly of bones beneath it. “If that’s me … and I’ve said goodbye and I’ve gone away …” She looked up at Master Puppet. “How am I still here?”

  “Oh, my lovely girl.” He ran his stick fingers through her hair. “Whoever said you had to be real to exist?”

  “But I’m here. With you.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, and held her tighter. “You are here. With the friend you built from memories and bones and the voice inside your mind. And we would have stayed here, together, by ourselves. We knew, though, when that baby came. That lively, growing, living boy. We knew what had to happen, didn’t we?”

  Magrit sniffed, and closed her eyes against more tears. “It couldn’t last.”

  “No, my poor girl.” Master Puppet stroked her hair. “Not when he was growing older and you never did. Not when he turned two and three and four, and you were always nearly ten. You’ll always be nearly ten, no matter how old he becomes. Ghost girls don’t age.”

  “And boys do.”

  “Real, live, living boys do. And sooner or later they need to be with real, live, living people, who can teach them to talk and live and be alive.”

  “But … But I touched him and picked him up and held him, and … and …”

  “Yes, yes you did. There are some things the living will allow, when they are young and innocent and know no better. But you are still a ghost, my most lovely ghost. Ghosts have no sounds to give to the living.”

  “He could see me. He spoke to me, in the end.”

  “It is in the nature of living things to see that which isn’t real …” Magrit knew Master Puppet was talking about himself as much as her, and her silent, non-beating heart wept at the thought. “Just as it is in their nature to reject it for the comfort of reality.”

  “And now he’s gone back.”

  “Yes. Back to real living people and our secret is discovered, and we can’t hide any more.”

  “What will we do?” She looked up at him, at the long, yellow line of his jawbone and the dim pits of his eye sockets as they looked into a distance she could never hope to see. “What can we do?”

  He did not move for a long, long time, until Magrit was afraid he would stay that way forever and she would fade away, like the ghost she knew she was, and be forgotten. Then he turned his face down to her and smiled.

  “I think it is time,” he said, “for us to discover what is beyond these walls, and whether our dreams of rooms and buildings and cemeteries forever are true.”

  “How?” She frowned in sudden worry.

  He nodded to the buildings around them. “The windows are open.”

  “But …”

  “But what?” He stood and raised her to stand at his side. “You, my dear, are the ghost of a young girl to whom we have already said goodbye. And I am nothing more than the result of your imagination and wishes. And windows that let people in can most certainly let ghosts out.” He gestured to the surrounding walls. “Pick one!”

  Magrit looked around: at the crypts in which she had slept for so many long years; at the paths along which she’d walked; at the overgrown lawns on which she had played. She gazed at the fountains, the jumpstones, the broken, battered, weathered edges of the only world she had ever known. She contemplated the walls that had trapped her, and the sudden choice of exits that flapped curtains at her like a million hands waving goodbye, or hello, or come here! It came to her that the cemetery had fallen silent again – truly silent, the way it had when she had discovered her skeleton lying in the grass, like it had when Bugrat had touched the forbidden windows and forced her world to collide with the larger one outside.

  Suddenly, she understood the silence, understood that the dead, the truly dead, have no need for the sounds of the living world, and the world saves its sounds for those who need them. She experienced a flash of overwhelming terror. Then she felt Master Puppet’s arm around her shoulder, felt the warmth of his love flowing through her mind, and saw his face looking down at her like it always had: watching over her, with her, always with her.

  “Listen,” he said. Magrit did. Underneath the silence, peeking out like a snail from its shell, she heard the gentle murmur of the world outside the graveyard.

  “It’s waiting,” Master Puppet said. “All you have to do is choose.”

  “That one,” she said, and pointed to a window at random. Master Puppet grinned and squeezed her hand.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  And together, Magrit the ghost girl and her protector, Master Puppet, climbed out of the cemetery and into the world.

  Acknowledgements

  First and foremost, unending thanks and love to my darling wife Lyn and my kids, for the months of nightly “What happens next?” reading sessions, stretched out on my bed, that inspired me to keep going every evening. Thanks also to the staff at Walker Books, especially Sue Whiting, for battering me for just as many months to get the book in some sort of coherent shape, and to my beta readers Paul, Leece and Tehani for their keen eyes and super-valuable critiques. Word up to Catharine Arnold, whose book Necropolis provided the pilot light. And grateful thanks to the City of London, for keeping so much of its history alive for me to plunder for my own nefarious ends. And because I swore I would always include a joke to reward anyone who bothered to read the acknowledgements: What do you call a blind dinosaur? A Doyouthinkhesaurus!

  Published in 2016

  by Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd

  Locked Bag 22, Newtown

  NSW 2042 Australia

  www.walkerbooks.com.au

  This ebook edition published i
n 2016

  The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted.

  Text © 2016 Lee Battersby

  Illustrations © 2016 Amy Daoud

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Battersby, Lee, 1970– author.

  Magrit / Lee Battersby; Amy Daoud.

  For children.

  Subjects: Paranormal fiction, Australian.

  Fantasy fiction, Australian.

  Other Creators/Contributors: Daoud, Amy, illustrator.

  A823.4

  ISBN: 978-1-922077-12-7 (ePub/mobi)

  ISBN: 978-1-922077-20-2 (ePDF)